“I’ve got my own personal relationship with football, especially at the elite level,” says 19-year-old Debra Nelson, “but I think, having an organisation that really, really lives by the power of the sport, in itself, strips back football to its bare bones, helps.
“This is what we do, we literally use the power of football to inspire girls, to get girls talking, to get girls active, to get girls enjoying themselves, making positive relationships. Football at the elite level has moved so far and is so removed from that.”
Nelson is a graduate of Football Beyond Borders, an organisation which uses the world’s most popular sport to engage young people who are struggling at school. It is refreshing to be reminded of the power of football in the context of the chaos at the top, and her energy is infectious.
She features alongside 15-year-old Shalukah Nareshkumar, who selected her as her role model, in FBB’s new photo book, Her Stories, which showcases the narratives of teenage girls and the women who have inspired them by documenting their relationships and journeys through photography and text.
“It’s loads of girls sharing their stories of women they idolise that aren’t so distant, or aren’t celebrities, or aren’t famous. It is real real, just natural role models that these girls look up to,” says Nelson. “I am Shalukah’s role model – even just saying it sounds really weird.
“A lot of times society makes you feel like your role model has to be someone that’s really famous or really successful because society deems success through monetary value or through social media value.”
Some of the girls photographed in the book are pictured with their mothers, others with grandmas or sisters. Nareshkumar chose Nelson, one of the project leads when she joined the programme.
“One of the things I most admire about Debra is that she’s very different to what I see on Instagram,” says Nareshkumar, which makes Nelson laugh. “The popular girls at school all try to act and grow up so quickly. What I always liked about Debra is that she owns the fact that she loves football. I just love that she owns her personality, she owns her roots, and she is just authentic and herself. That’s what really influenced me, to realise that actually, no, you don’t need to be a certain way.
“Seeing my peers that haven’t been able to have access to FBB, and how they have this subconscious pressure to be a certain way because of society, it’s kind of sad, because they haven’t been able to realise that actually being you is enough.”
Nareshkumar was raised in a single-parent family and with that came certain preconceptions about what she would and should be. When she joined FBB she “genuinely did not like sport and would not get on a pitch”. The organisation strips away the pressures and expectations that come with playing football and earns the trust of the young people it works with.
“For someone who had a very prestigious perception of football and then have that label and that expectation be removed is cool,” she says. “I realised so much of primary school was just about not doing PE because I felt like I wasn’t good enough and I just I wasn’t able to. FBB just said: ‘There’s no expectation, this is just for you to enjoy, no one’s watching, we’re all a community here. No one’s gonna judge you.’ It’s so easy to think someone should already understand all of that but to hear it out loud is actually quite a big thing.”
For Nelson the journey was different, she wasn’t a bad kid but she was “disengaged with school” and struggled to see the point in it, but she loved football.
“Probably the height of my passion for the sport was when I entered secondary school,” she says. “That’s also when I realised, fully, that football isn’t actually very open and equal to both boys and girls. The boys’ team had fully scheduled training this day, match this day, coaches, their minibus to get you to matches – everything. Whereas with the girls’ team it was more about whenever the coach was free, he might give you a football, he might give you some bibs if you’re lucky.”
Nelson adds: “I was the only girl on an all-boys programme, with male coaches. I always had to look at male coaches as my role models, as well as having a really good support system at home with my mum. I guess you underestimate what kind of impact you can have on someone by just being committed, being there for them and building trust in a relationship. That’s literally all I did for Shalukah, I was just there every Friday and I was relatable.”
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They are there every week and in Nareshkumar’s case for three years and counting. “I can remember countless times,” Nelson says, “standing on the sideline next to Shalukah being like: ‘You don’t have to play but I really want you to encourage the girls on the sideline.’ And then three weeks later, she’s shouting on the sideline: ‘Come on girls, come on, come on, let’s get a goal.’ Then two months later, after us doing that continuously every week, she’s all: ‘Actually, now I want to be on the football pitch.’
“We strip back football, take away the bright big, bold lights of a football pitch at a stadium and show girls that this patch of astroturf in the back of their school is their stadium, and tell them that they are going to take ownership of this pitch. We’re gonna spend time just making football theirs.”